The Tools of Performance Analysis

This manual describes the Collector and Performance Analyzer, a pair of tools
that you use to collect and analyze performance data for your application. The
manual also describes the er_print utility, a command-line tool for displaying and analyzing
collected performance data in text form. The Analyzer and er_print utility show mostly
the same data, but use different user interfaces.

An additional Oracle Solaris Studio tool called Spot can be used to
produce a performance report about your application. This tool is complementary to the Performance
Analyzer. See the spot(1) man page for more information.

The Collector and Performance Analyzer are designed for use by any software developer,
even if performance tuning is not the developer’s main responsibility. These tools provide
a more flexible, detailed, and accurate analysis than the commonly used profiling tools
prof and gprof and are not subject to an attribution error in gprof.

The Collector and Performance Analyzer tools help to answer the following kinds of
questions:

How much of the available resources does the program consume?

Which functions or load objects are consuming the most resources?

Which source lines and instructions are responsible for resource consumption?

How did the program arrive at this point in the execution?

Which resources are being consumed by a function or load object?

The Collector Tool

The Collector tool collects performance data using a statistical method called profiling and
by tracing function calls. The data can include call stacks, microstate accounting information
(on Oracle Solaris platforms only), thread synchronization delay data, hardware counter overflow data,
Message Passing Interface (MPI) function call data, memory allocation data, and summary information for
the operating system and the process. The Collector can collect all kinds of
data for C, C++ and Fortran programs, and it can collect profiling data
for applications written in the Java programming language. It can collect data for
dynamically-generated functions and for descendant processes. See Chapter 2, Performance Data for information about the data
collected and Chapter 3, Collecting Performance Data for detailed information about the Collector. The Collector can be
run from the Performance Analyzer GUI, from the dbx command line tool, and using
the collect command.

The Performance Analyzer Tool

The Performance Analyzer tool displays the data recorded by the Collector, so that
you can examine the information. The Performance Analyzer processes the data and displays
various metrics of performance at the level of the program, the functions, the
source lines, and the instructions. These metrics are classed into five groups:

Clock profiling metrics

Hardware counter metrics

Synchronization delay metrics

Memory allocation metrics

MPI tracing metrics

The Performance Analyzer's Timeline displays the raw data in a graphical format as
a function of time.

The Performance Analyzer can also display metrics of performance for structures in the
dataspace of the target program, and for structural components of the memory subsystem.
This data is an extension of the hardware counter metrics.

In addition, the Performance Analyzer can display data for the Thread Analyzer, a
specialized view of the Performance Analyzer that is designed for examining thread analysis
experiments. A separate command, tha, is used to start the Performance Analyzer with
this specialized view, and the tool when started in this way is known
as the Thread Analyzer.

Chapter 7, Understanding Annotated Source and Disassembly Data provides an understanding of the annotated source and disassembly, providing explanations about
the different types of index lines and compiler commentary that the Performance Analyzer
displays. Annotated source code listings and disassembly code listings that include compiler commentary but
do not include performance data can be viewed with the er_src utility, which
is also described in this chapter.

After downloading, you can extract the zip file in a directory of your
choice. The sample applications are located in the PerformanceAnalyzer subdirectory of the SolarisStudioSampleApplications
directory. See the README file in each sample directory for information about how
to use the sample code with the Analyzer.

The er_print Utility

The er_print utility presents in plain text all the displays that are presented
by the Performance Analyzer, with the exception of the Timeline display, the MPI
Timeline display, and the MPI Chart display. These displays are inherently graphical and
cannot be presented as text.